Homily: The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost [July 21, 2019] St. Michael’s, Studio City

Gary Hall
St. Michael and All Angels, Studio City
July 21, 2019 [6 Pentecost]


It seems like a lifetime ago now, but for several years I taught American literature first at UCLA (on that side of the hill) and then at Oakwood School (on this side of the hill). I was already ordained before I went to graduate school, and I left parish ministry for a time because I so loved both the subject matter and working with kids on a daily basis. Eventually I went back to full time work in the church, but I have always carried with me the delight of engaging others in discussion over novels and poems.
Mark Twain is probably the most fun American writer to teach. His 1894 novel Pudd’nhead Wilson is one of my favorites, not so much for its story as for the epigrams that begin each chapter. The character David “Puddn’head” Wilson publishes a calendar, each month featuring one of his characteristic sayings. For example:
“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”
“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”
“In the first place, God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards.”
And my favorite, a parody of Rudyard Kipling’s inspirational poem, “If”: “If you can keep your head when those around you are losing theirs, you are not aware of the situation.”
Now Mark Twain was not much of a Bible reader, and that’s a shame, because if he were he might have made up a Pudd’nhead Wilson calendar entry that would help us understand our reaction to challenging scripture passages. Last week we heard the parable of the Good Samaritan, a story from Jesus that tells us that the respectable people leave a man in the road to die. Today’s gospel has Jesus seemingly praising a layabout and chastising a hard worker. If Mark Twain had been in the Bible business, he might have had Pudd’nhead Wilson say something like this: “You don’t get Jesus’s teaching unless it makes you really mad.” Not hilarious, I admit. But pretty accurate.
“You don’t get Jesus’s teaching unless it makes you really mad.” Think about it. There’s the parable of the prodigal son, where the loser brother gets the fatted calf and the hardworking brother gets chastised. There’s the teaching about rich people entering the kingdom of God being like camels trying to get through the eyes of needles. Years of preaching on and listening to these stories have effectively put stained glass around them, and we treat them as holy objects too delicate actually to engage. But let’s be honest. Jesus’s stories are often insulting to our basic ideas of fairness and common sense. He does not make these statements to prettify the status quo. He makes them to shake us up. And so, my Pudd’nhead Wilson-esque suggestion for today: “You don’t get Jesus’s teaching unless it makes you really mad.”
Today’s gospel [Luke 10: 38-42] gives us a perfect example.  Jesus goes to the house of Martha and Mary. Martha welcomes Jesus. Her sister Mary sits at Jesus’s feet and listens to his teaching. Martha bustles around the house with all the tasks attendant on Near Eastern hospitality. When Martha can no longer stand the inequality, she snaps, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me." But instead of siding with an aggrieved woman, Jesus admonishes her: "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."
Now, admit it. Doesn’t this make you mad? If it doesn’t, shouldn’t it?
I have heard more bad sermons on this gospel reading than perhaps on any other. I’ve even delivered a few myself. We preachers tie ourselves in knots by trying to make Jesus sound more plausible than he does. We make it sound like he isn’t really saying what we patently know to be the case. Usually, the preacher will say something about the difference between the active (Martha) and contemplative (Mary) spiritual life. But that neat distinction never really works. Anyone can tell that things are askew here. Something about Jesus’s response to Martha outrages my innate sense of fairness. Admittedly, Martha’s initial complaint to Jesus is hard to warm up to. Nobody likes a fink. Yet still we see the justice of her cause. Her sister is leaving her to do all the work.
Or is she? Let’s begin with the best case for Martha. She has a guest in her home, and she is performing all the duties attendant on hospitality, a prime virtue in the ancient Near East. Hospitality to travelers was in those days and remains today a moral obligation in many cultures around the world. Martha is not just being a busybody. In making Jesus feel welcome she is doing important work.
And then there is Mary. She is not just lying on the sofa watching Jerry Springer and eating Cheetos. She is “sitting at the Lord’s feet” (παρακαθεσθεῖσα πρὸς τοὺς πόδας) and “listening to what he is saying” (ἤκουεν τὸν λόγον αὐτοῦ). These are not just chance descriptors. They are technical terms from the world of both Jewish and classical teaching. Whether in the Temple or the marketplace, you “sit at someone’s feet” as their student. You “listen to what they are saying” because you are in training to do what they do. You are planning to be a rabbi or philosopher yourself. And planning to be a rabbi or philosopher is something women were not supposed to do.
Mary’s conduct outrages her sister only secondarily because it leaves her with all the housework. Martha becomes unsettled and disturbed because her sister Mary has suddenly upended all her culture’s gender distinctions. In the ancient Near East, women and men inhabited different social spheres in the world and different rooms in the household. Mary has crossed the boundary from the kitchen to the living room. She is sitting at Jesus’s feet and listening to what he is saying. She is behaving like a man.
Mary’s behavior is indeed startling on its own terms, and Jesus’s praise of it could easily make one mad. Gender roles go deep in a culture. Perhaps that is why so many people my age seem to have difficulty with both transgender and non-binary ways of self-identification. But the gender bending here says more about Jesus and his community than it does about personal identity. The household over which Jesus presides is one that knows no boundaries. The love and justice incarnate in Jesus transcends any arbitrary way we may have of defining ourselves. When you enter the Jesus zone, all previous bets are off. You are free to be who you are, free to pursue your deepest drives and passions, because in Jesus’s world you are accepted and blessed as you are. In sitting at Jesus’s feet and listening to his words, Mary is acting out of her truest self. And that is not only OK. It is good.
Over the years, I have been fortunate to spend a good deal of time in monasteries. Many years ago I was staying at Holy Cross Monastery in West Park, New York, the headquarters of the Order of the Holy Cross, of which I am an Associate. I vividly remember attending a festival service there celebrating the order’s anniversary. The presiding bishop celebrated and the superior, the head brother in the order, preached. Everyone was dressed up in ecclesiastical finery. When the service ended, we all adjourned to a festive lunch. After lunch, I saw the superior—the same head guy who had just preached at the festival service and chatted amiably with church dignitaries—get up from the table, go to the kitchen, put on an apron, and begin busing dishes, scraping and then rinsing our plates.
What I loved about that is that I saw someone I greatly respected inhabiting both Martha and Mary modes in the same moment. With Mary, he had sat at their feet and listened to what they were saying. With Martha he had performed the essential acts of hospitality. Both aspects seemed to coexist authentically within him. He did not fall for a false choice.
In refusing to chastise Mary, Jesus does not denigrate Martha. He understands that the gender and power roles our culture assigns us to be fluid and not fixed. He allows for the possibility that people will find fulfillment in culturally surprising ways. And he creates a community in which it is OK for you and me to try on new and alternative ways of being. The point of this story is neither that we should all give up grunt work and contemplate our navels, nor that we should assault the roles we have learned to inhabit over a lifetime. The point is that, in the presence of Jesus and each other, we can be free both to be who we really are and to follow the logic of God’s promptings in our lives. And that creative freedom allows us both to find peace in self-acceptance and to find courage to change and bless the world.
Pudd’nhead Wilson never got around to writing a Bible calendar, and perhaps that’s just as well. Following Jesus is a lifetime of self-discovery, and the truths we find there don’t always boil down neatly into aphorisms. It may well be that, “You don’t get Jesus’s teaching unless it makes you really mad;” but after that flash of anger might come the realization that there are new ways of doing things, and living into them might just be the start of a new and purposeful life. Amen.